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Elections are won and countries are governed from the common ground, not the 'middle ground'

Aiming for the soggy "middle ground" between the two parties is no way to win an election

As readers of this blog will know, I do not believe that the way for the Conservative Party to dominate British politics and to win elections is to move Left on to the so-called "middle ground". That view does not spring solely from my own experience of being part of a formidable election-winning team 25 or 30 years ago, nor seeing my majority at Chingford climb from 5,683 to 17,955 – it is founded on basic political geometry.

The trouble with trying to move towards the position occupied by Labour is that as the Tories move towards it, that middle itself moves Leftwards. Not only that, moving away from one's own strong ground would concede that Labour's position was better than one's own. Indeed it may well be that it would push Labour, and with it that middle ground, further to the Left, when surely the object should be to convert Labour's supporters to the Conservative view.

Of course the middle-ground theory is attractive to the intellectually lazy, or to the careerist with no strong convictions except that of the desirability of holding office. Those Conservatives who reject the theory do not do so in the belief that a thoughtless move to the Right is a sure-fire formula for success, any more than even half-intelligent Labour supporter see the way into office as a retreat into the wilder thickets of socialism.

The first requirement for a successful political party is to have a coherent vision of what government is for and of how those objectives could best be achieved. Without that the whole enterprise is worse than a waste of time. After that comes the consideration of how best to attract voters.

At the heart of that is the concept of "the common ground" – that is, the assumptions and interest shared by a majority of the electors. That will change from time to time as the political, economic and social landscape changes, but there is not too much difficulty in identifying where it lies today.

Standing out as the issue which unites voter across the political spectrum is immigration. It is not solely the concern of "the far Right". It is what they talk about in the pubs in many solid Labour constituencies. It is of less concern to the "long gravel drive, two Volvos and a foreign au pair" households, but in the Tory lower-middle-class strongholds too it is a major issue.

So is the matter of our relationship with the European Union. Again the soggy middle-ground Lib Dem voters may regard Europhilia as an essential social asset, but they are wildly outnumbered across society as a whole who regard it as an unpleasant disorder.

The same is true of the problems of crime. It is has long been all too real for inner-city Labour voters, and it is growing in the Tory suburbs and even in their rural villages and farms. Similarly, the problem of sink schools was once confined to the Labour heartlands, but the failure of our education system is now of concern to the middle classes too.

Fortunately the alliance of Frank Field and Iain Duncan Smith has demonstrated that there is widespread support amongst traditional Labour voters for an attack on welfare abuse. Few people are more incensed by the scrounging "won't work brigade" than the man who comes home from work on a modest wage to see his workshy neighbour better off on benefit than he is by working.

There are still many common values across British society today. They are not confined to the soggy centre, though they are not always apparent to the pollsters' self-confining questions in focus group discussions. They are the stuff of the common ground, which is where elections are won and from where we should be as a nation be governed.

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As if writing about "same-sex marriage" did not land me in enough trouble, I was in it again on the subject of the Budget, and as Amos 47 noted the headline over my blog was again somewhat misleading about the balance of my comments.

Several themes emerged from your comments with a lot of argument about whether the elderly had been badly treated, the changes to child benefit for higher earners, and whether the overall balance of the Budget was right.

Apart from a very few mavericks, there was general agreement that the Chancellor had an unenviable inheritance from Gordon Brown, with HugoandFreddie quick off the mark to correct my suggestion that he had sailed the economy close to a rocky lee shore. More like heading straight for it they said.

Several posts, notably those from Suboptimal Planet and derekemery, concluded that more should have been done to reduce spending since the deficit is still rising and the debt mountain growing. Elliot Kane weighed in on this, targeting foreign aid and red-tape administration. So too did alhamilton with much sense on education, immigration quangos and the cost of EU membership.

I took a fair beating on the matter of tax relief for older people. First I should emphasise that I am not a beneficiary. My case was that old age is expensive. Try insuring a car, heating a house, and paying for people to do the things that one used to do oneself – the garden, the window cleaning and the special diets, let alone home care. Freezing such allowances is cutting them in real terms and denying them to those who would otherwise have qualified for them at pensionable age is a loss of a benefit that could have been reasonably expected.

Of course it could be argued that this concession should never have been given, but it was and now it is being frozen away by inflation. As Keith Joseph observed of another such proposal long ago, "It is one thing to deny a dog a bone, but it is another to take a bone away from a dog."

As to the substantial increase in the state pension, that of course was to compensate for inflation. As to the suggestion that a home owner really benefits from the inflation in house prices, that is not so unless the home owner trades down, although I suppose his heirs may do so.

There was plenty said about the child benefit issue too. Like many of you, I doubt if any £50,000-a-year household should be getting child benefit, but again we have to remember Keith Joseph's words. The issue here however was whether the £50,000 should be the family income or that of either of two earners. In my view, whatever the limit it should be a family income limit, not that of either earner.

Then a number of you disagreed with my suggestion that Ed Miliband had a rather better day than usual. Of course I did not like his style, or think that he made a great intellectual contribution. I referred to it all as "theatre" and he was playing to a particular audience, which, olcrom apart, does not often read this blog, and I think they liked his speech.

I think it a pity that the Chancellor did not defend his policy and make clear in his speech what his reference to "simplification" of the tax allowances of pensioners was. By not doing so, he opened himself to the charge of spinning, as colliemum said and even, God help us all, of being likened to Chancellor Brown!

As ever I am grateful to those, including Rastasctastey, martinfielding, non-aligned, IgonikonJack and The RealJoePublic for their support. On the other hand I was attacked by BudaNevey for not supporting "homosexual marriage", and Norto for not defending conventional marriage. It is a hard life as a blogger at times. Then Angus Swan wrote that the ECHR has no jurisdiction in that matter. I never said that it did. However, it does have jurisdiction over the application of UK law on marriage, and that is where the mischief of claims that churches or clergy were guilty of discrimination or homophobia if they declined to officiate in "homosexual marriage" ceremonies. That point was well made by Luxius too.

I think disfranchised may have heard a muddled report of what Nick Boles MP said in a question to the Prime Minister. As I understood the reference was to my longstanding support for raising the threshold of income tax.

Sadly, it looks from the early opinion polls as though the Budget has lost support for the Government. That is pity. It was an opportunity lost, partly at least yet again through a failure to subject policy to critical evaluation before it is announced.